Secret Village - A Coloring Book Adventure: Beyond the Garden Gate, Beneath the Forest Floor, Among the Hollow Trees - A Mystery Endures! (Purse Sized ... & Inspirational for Ages 9 to Adult)

The book has a unique concept by giving a view of the underground world. The single sided pages have a drawing of life underground (roots, rocks, dirt and little tunnels leading to rooms that any little critter or insect can use as their home) and are blank on the back. Almost all underground pics start with a tree and the underground home/world is drawn beneath the tree (not 100% but the majority) thus there are a lot of very similar pages. My granddaughter (age 5) draws "worms" to the pictures b/c the rooms look empty without something living in them. The underground pics alternate with much smaller pics of simple random objects (three flowers for example). The "con" of this unique underworld concept is figuring out what is above ground and what is below. Rocks, dirt, roots curly-cues (frequently used) can be above or below and due to the "cut away" concept of the book, it is very difficult to determine where they are located. The author could have prevented this had ONE colored example been given. I am unsure if I'll attempt another page after the first page not turning out well. Enchanted Forest has some underground but it is easy to tell what is below/above underground and the underground part of EF is not nearly as detailed or as large.The largest con is the quality! The pages look like they were run off on an old xerox machine. The old machines left black smudges, inaccurate blurred lines, etc when making copies! A $49 printer/copier could have produced a higher quality. The quality is even worse when the pictures are enlarged from one page to create a new close-up view for a new page. Additionally the paper is poor quality. Even with a blank page in-between, the next picture shows through. The cover has a nice cover but page quality should never be compromised for a cover.In summary, if you like nature, want unique under-ground scenes and can look past poor quality pictures and pages then this book may very well be for you. I would not give as a gift b/c of difficulty and poor quality. I do not know whether I'd recommend it to others. I wish I would have known of these issues beforehand. Hopefully the illustrator can provide some variations, an example of completed pic, some animal/insect families etc and most of all, INCREASE QUALITY. If all of those happened, the book would be a five star:)

Pages are thin for fineliners (marker pens). Nice intricate pics but some are a larger scale repeat of another. (They're are cropped close-ups of some repeated pictures). Pictures can be done with part pen and part pencil if you chose to color in the larger sections of the picture, so as not to make it scribble looking and waste ink. Blank pages in between each picture page and blank ones at the back of the book make it look thicker. Those pages are made for ink checks (and good for when your pen leaks through though). Every other page has a Very simple drawing to color, again making the book thicker and gives you fewer pictures to color. Otherwise, I like this book. Hope the photos help you see what you're getting.

Secret Village is one of the adult coloring books that I have purchased twice. One for me and one for a benefit Chinese Auction basket that I put together consisting of adult coloring books, pencils and markers.If you like a fairy, troll or elf secret village type of picture to color, this book is for you. I like this type of thing and have had fun coloring the little houses made of tree trunks and all the cute furnishings in the book. There are plenty of flowers, butterflies, pumpkins, etc. to color that are scattered among the villages as well. The pages are one-sided, so you don't have to worry about your pens or markers bleeding through to the other side of the page and ruining the design on that side. The cover is made of thick cardstock paper with a waxy coating that a lot of the adult coloring books have. I like this waxy feel and I think it adds to the quality of the books. I would recommend this book for kids ages 8 or 9, up to age 90+.My only complaint with this book is that some of the lines are blurry and too thick. The printing quality could have been a bit better here.

In the realm of colour books, I am an obsessive collector, and these are some of the most wonderful images I have seen. The author/illustrator has no control over the paper quality in this method of publishing, but she was very nice to make these pages single sided so the ink doesn't bleed through. Some of the lines are a bit thick and didn't print so well (also something that's hard to control) but I still think this book stands out in a sea of other color books.Some of the images have very small details, and I love that. The more complex the pattern, the happier it makes me, and this woman draws the kind of things that I want to colour. I bought a copy of this book for my son, who is really getting into more complex colouring, but then I fell in love with it and went back and bought one for me too.There is something for everyone here as far as range of complexity goes, and I really think this would make a beautiful gift. I look forward to seeing more books from this artist.

If you're not familiar with Amazon printed books, this is one, yes. Printed on copier paper with the typical one-sided images (so you can use various mediums), the slightly pixelated lines, the satin cover, and the glue binding. WHY is this book so much more expensive than other Amazon printed books? I couldn't for the life of me tell you. There is nothing to indicate this is anything better or worse than other, more popular Amazon printed books like Bennett Klein's books, or Zifflin's books. So, if you buy this, you better love the images. Turns out, I do. I adore the tiny houses and little details of stoves and science equipment and bunk beds and tiny tea settings dug into the earth by little people, fairies, mice, whatever you can imagine. This book is a miniature lover's dream, especially if you don't have space in your home for a tiny scale model of Bilbo's Hobbit hole. So yes, it's expensive, and the printing it typically awful, but if you love the subject matter it's worth a buy.

I absolutely adore the drawings, and I too hope the artist finds a better Publishing company. The paper is so thin it just bleeds through. I love to work in brush-pens and also pencils as I love building layers. I’ve only just started on this and it’s already bleeding through into the drawing on the next page. Further on blank pages are left so you ‘can use felt-markers’ but even then I think it would bleed through unless you put card in between. Although Sarah states ‘Do Not Copy’ my only recommendation is that you photocopy the pages onto better quality paper before you start as the images are beautiful to colour- not something Sarah wants, but I’m not paying £10 for something otherwise not fit for purpose.A word on ‘some of the drawings having thick lines’ the cover does say ‘Colouring Book for Adults and Children’ - the larger blocky-images with the thick lines I’ve interpreted as being images that children could colour. Something I thought was actually wonderful because it brings it as something to share - you have your pages, and a child is contributing in the same book. But again it’s the quality of the paper letting it down. If you want to buy, the drawings are lovely, but - sorry Sarah - the only way I could recommend this is if you photocopy the pages and work on those so you don’t ruin the next beautiful drawing.

I was really disappointed with the book- as it looks 'my sort of colouring book'. The actual illustrations are lovely but the book' paper is very thin and there would be bleed through with any felt pens or markers- they have left blank pages in-between which seems like a dreadful waste of paper.The images are also inconsistently printed- some pages they are heavy/black and on others grey. The images are quite fuzzy as well on a number of pages. It's a pity as the illustrations are creative- the author has been let down badly by the print and design process. Will be returning book.

I am really disappointed with this book, the pictures are beautiful, but the book is flimsy, the pages are too thin, the cover is much too thin and it feels photocopied.The pictures look like they've been scanned then photocopied. A very poor quality print job totally ruins what would have been beautiful pictures.I am going to keep it in the car for times when I'm sat waiting and need something to do, that's about all it's good for. I feel very sorry for the Artist.The only positive which my other books don't have, is that the pictures are only printed on one side of the page, but it will still need something else between pages because the pages are so thin.

I have to agree with the reviewers who have commented on the quality. My pens didn't soak through the page, but nonetheless the print quality is lower than I expected, and the books is smaller than I thought it would be. The illustrations are lovely and I find them fascinating, but I really think they need to be printed in a higher quality. I'd happily pay more for them if they were.

Not very good quality paper or printing, and very strangely the content is identical to the volume 1 I ordered at the same time, the only thing that I could find that was different was the ISBN number and the colour of the spine, so sorry Amazon, its on its way back to you. :-(